Focused Profiles on Jazz and its Creators while also Featuring the Work of Guest Writers and Critics on the Subject of Jazz.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

"Hidden in Plain Hearing: The Roots of Cool Jazz in the Big Band of Claude Thornhill" – From The Archives

“I wonder if the world will ever know how much it had in this
beautiful man.”

- Duke Ellington

The editorial
staff at JazzProfiles had occasion to revisit Claude Thornhill’s music
this past weekend courtesy of a featured concert at the La Jazz Institute’s
four-day festival entitled Swingin’ on a Riff which was held at
the Los Angeles Airport Marriott Hotel from May 23-26, 2013.

It prompted us to
repost this article about Claude and his band and to develop the video that
you’ll find at the end of this piece which features Gil Evans’ arrangement for
the band of Charlie Parker’s Anthropology.

“Sixty years ago,
in the hot summer of 1948, a cadre of young arrangers and players worked in a
basement apartment behind a Chinese laundry on West 55th Street in New York to
craft music that would later be tagged "the birth of the cool" -- the
first notable instance of a harmonically rich, emotionally subtle type of jazz
that washed its gorgeous chords and subtle dynamics over a big chunk of the
1950s.

Trumpeter Miles
Davis was the nominal leader of this ensemble, but it was the outfit's
arrangers -- primarily Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan -- who were the real stars.
The devices they drew on had been available for years, hidden in plain hearing
within the big band of Claude Thornhill.

The shy,
Indiana-born Thornhill had been on the swing and dance-band scene since the
1930s: a pianist, arranger and leader whose self-penned theme-song, Snowfall, was an ethereal tone-poem in
which time almost seemed to stop. Thornhill favored slow tempi and lingering
phrases. His band's instrumentation included two French horns, a sonorous tuba,
and enough reed players to allow for passages with six or seven clarinets at a
time. With a theme like Snowfall, the
Thornhill band epitomized coolness from the moment it took the stage.

The Canadian-born
Gil Evans, who joined that band in 1941, proved to be Thornhill's ideal
arranger. When bebop emerged, Evans blended its busy lines and advanced
progressions with Thornhill's meditative approach, writing engaging
arrangements of bop standards such as altoist Charlie Parker's Anthropology and Yardbird Suite.

Evans also
arranged Donna Lee, a tune by
Parker's young sideman Miles Davis. Lee Konitz, then an equally young alto-sax
player from Chicago whose dry-ice tone fit perfectly into Thornhill's low-vibrato
outfit, remembers Davis coming to hear the band in 1947 at New York's Pennsylvania Hotel.

"It was
basically a ballad band," Mr. Konitz (now 80 and still active as a player)
said recently. "People loved dancing to it. Gil's beautiful writing was
very danceable. . . . Miles liked the band." In 1950, Davis would describe Thornhill's orchestra to
Down Beat magazine as "the greatest band of these modern times. . . . It
was commercially good and musically good."

But Thornhill
disbanded this orchestra in early 1948 for undisclosed reasons. "Thornhill
was pretty removed from everything," says Mr. Konitz. "I don't think
I ever said much more than 'hello' to him in 10 months."

Gil Evans's tiny
apartment on West 55th -- a place Thornhill himself had lived in, back in 1940
-- then became a sort of workshop where Evans and Mulligan, encouraged by Davis and joined by John Lewis and John Carisi,
attempted to re-create the Thornhill band's sound with as few instruments as
possible. This proved to be nine: trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, alto
sax, baritone sax; and a rhythm section of piano, bass and drums.

Players for this
nonet were chosen (including several Thornhill veterans). Rehearsals were held.
Davis became the nascent band's leader, but the
ensemble was no showcase for individual players, says Mr. Konitz (who became
its alto saxophonist): "This was a chamber group -- compositional. Solos
were kind of incidental."

The nonet was
booked for a few weeks' work at the Royal Roost, a jazz venue on Broadway. In September
1948, "'Impressions in Modern Music,' with the new Miles Davis
organization" made its debut, and some of its sets were heard by insomniac
New Yorkers via remote wee-hours radio broadcasts.

The nonet
attracted the attention of a Capitol Records executive who made sure it
recorded a total of 12 numbers in 1949 and 1950 -- tracks that came out first
on 78-rpm singles, then on a 10-inch long-playing disc, and, in 1957, on a
12-inch album at last titled Birth of the Cool. By then the Davis
group had inspired or influenced a host of other cool-sounding nonets, octets,
quartets and tentets -- the most successful of which was Gerry Mulligan's
"piano-less" foursome with trumpeter Chet Baker, whose lyrical,
minimal style was not unlike Miles Davis's.

The Complete Birth of the
Cool, a 1998 Capitol
CD including broadcast transcriptions from the Royal Roost, continues to sell.
And the "Birth of the Cool" mystique grows: This February,
jazz-drummer and writer Bill Moody published "Shades of Blue"
(Poisoned Pen Press), a contemporary mystery novel turning on events
surrounding the Davis nonet.

Mike Zwerin, the
young trombonist in that '48 live-performance unit (but not on the records),
reversed the career arc of several nonet members: After first working in Davis's
group, he later played with the Claude Thornhill band -- albeit a
much-diminished 1958 touring outfit. "[Claude] kept his dignity as his
audience dwindled," wrote Mr. Zwerin, now a well-regarded music journalist
and author. " . . . I marvel at how much control that must have involved,
considering the skid he was on. He knew he had been something special."
Thornhill died in 1965, at the age of 55, on the eve of another comeback.

Davis followed Birth of the Cool with a long and
noteworthy career that saw several more collaborations with Evans, including
their epochal LPs Sketches of Spain
and Porgy
and Bess.

And Evans made
several albums of his own, including a 1961 platter titled (in acknowledgment
of his musical genesis) "Out of the Cool." Perhaps the most
ear-catching track on that disc was an Evans opus that became a sort of
signature piece for the big band he'd lead in sporadic performance for 30
years; it was probably Evans's best-known composition.

Claude Thornhill's
old protégé named this semi-theme song La
Nevada -- Spanish for Snowfall.”

Mr. Nolan is
editor of "The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer,
Private Investigator," by Ross Macdonald (Crippen & Landru).